What's the most you ever got from a college roommate?
In my case, I was lucky to get gas money for a ride to
Taco Bell. GoPro founder Nick Woodman has had a
SLIGHTLY different experience. As of yesterday, Nick's
old college roommate at the University of California at
San Diego is $229 million richer thanks to his
association with the billionaire CEO. And that's only if
you count their most recent financial exchange – when
you consider that Woodman's roommate Neil Dana was
also GoPro's first employee, and remains a high-ranking
executive within the company today, he probably has
Woodman to thank for a lot more than that…
The deal has come to be a pretty complicated affair that
probably only makes perfect sense to financial experts,
but basically it went like this: Back in the company's
early days of 2004, when the GoPro company was just
getting started, Woodman made a promise to give Dana
10% of any money made from the sale of GoPro stock.
Back in 2011, Dana got more than six million GoPro
shares, with Woodman promising to personally
reimburse his own company when those stock options
were activated. That finally happened this week, and
Nick Woodman is now $229 million poorer as a result.
Andrew Burton/Getty Images
Of course, when you're a billionaire, and the highest-
paid CEO in the United States to boot, you can afford to
shed $229 million among friends. And that definitely
applies to Nick Woodman, who has a net worth of $2.3
billion following this deal, and having first become a
billionaire back in the summer of 2014 when his
company went public. That becomes even more
impressive when you realize the humble beginnings that
GoPro came from, starting as a simple manufacturer of
camera straps and other accessories before breaking
into actual cameras and becoming a cultural as well as
financial phenomenon. Everybody knows what a GoPro is
nowadays, and "GoPro video" has become something of
its own genre over the last couple years, denoting a very
specific (and appealing) kind of image. Obviously, that
kind of success doesn't often come without its financial
rewards, and in the last year alone (and this is where he
became the highest-paid US CEO), Woodman received a
staggering $284.5 million, not in straight salary but as
compensation for 4.5 million of his stock units in the
company.
As for Neil Dana, the GoPro director of music and
specialty sales had to spend some money to make this $
229 million, having spent $3.6 million in order to
exercise his stock options and cash in on that promise
made ten years ago. Dana isn't the only associate of
Nick Woodman's to be treated right by the CEO,
however. According to Securities and Exchange
Commission filings from GoPro's IPO last year, several
members of Woodman's family became millionaires in
the deal, including his mother, father, and two sisters,
so apparently everybody on this guy's boat has enjoyed
some of that rising tide. It does kind of make you wish
you'd had better luck with your own college roommate,
doesn't it?
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